a room apart
by fiesa
Summary: The two most important women of Patrick Jane's current life stood in this room. Drabble, episode tag to 5x16.


**A Room Apart**

_Summary: The two most important women of Patrick Jane's current life stood in this room. Drabble, episode tag to 5x16._

_Warning: Drabble._

_Set: Episode tag to s05ep16._

_Disclaimer: Standards apply. _

_A/N: How can I say it? I don't think Jane feels _nothing_ for Lisbon. He is cruel - from a certain point of view. But he does not see it that way. Also, he probably does not think in the categories normal people think in. Everything I write, please do not regard it as if I want to criticize him, or make him look bad. If someone treated you the way Jane treats Lisbon, what would you think?_

* * *

_Prologue I_

In the end, as it is every time, it is a message to him.

A warehouse filled with circus props. Abandoned carousel horses, dusty stalls, forgotten costumes. Red John always knew how to get to him, every single one of his kills is a carefully arranged, artfully balanced message to the man who chases after him. Patrick Jane knows his mortal enemy is merely a few steps in front of him, not the huge distance it sometimes seems. Yet there is no place where he feels further behind than when on the scene of Red John's murders.

Lorelai is naked, her creamy skin now pale in death. Her blood on the faded brick wall is dark and horrid, to the whiteness of her complexion it is shockingly bright. Her hair is brown and untangled. Empty eyes stare right through him.

She is arranged on the circus stage the same way he found Angela on their bed. The similarity is sickening.

* * *

_Prologue II_

Hate, she thinks, is only possible when the opposing emotion is involved just as strongly. It is all about trust. And about all-too-fine lines.

* * *

_a room apart_

It's a simple room.

The overall impression it gives to Patrick is the one of a unused one. No home, because there is no homeliness, no shelter, because there is no safety and comfort. No hide-out, no sleeping place, no secret place for hidden encounters – just a room, bare and beige, with not one sign of having been lived in. Beige carpets, beige sofas, tables without use, shelves without reason. It feels, he reflects, quite a lot the way he feels.

Empty_. _

A car comes to life outside. The sounds recede with the distance that grows between him and Lisbon. Symbolic, the same way everything tonight was. Strange how the two most important women in his current life had been in this very same room, had talked to him mere hours apart. And still hadn't met. Lorelai Martins still looked beautiful, alluring and dangerous, still had the bitter twist in her lips and the cruel light in her eyes that could be mistaken for a flair of exoticness. Teresa Lisbon still looked small, familiar and determined, still had the aura of hurt in her eyes and a bitterness to her tone he had never heard from her before and that could not be mocked away by him for once. They were so different and yet so important to him, both a mean to catch Red John. Antitheses in themselves, the perfect opposites: Justice and Injustice, law and emotion, truth and lie. Only has Patrick forgotten who of them was truth and who was not, and now he who never forgets struggles to tell them apart in his mind.

Lisbon gives him an ultimatum and he is pretty sure he never saw the sheen of tears in her eyes directed at him before. Getting Lorelai to kill someone was not his fault, because she was a killer at heart already. Making Lisbon go against everything she was – it was against nature, entirely his fault. It was wrongness in itself for which he would burn in hell. Actually, this seemed a punishment much too soft for what he was doing.

Not for the first time, Patrick Jane felt a stab of guilt watching her walk away. What was new was the fervent wish to chase after her and make it right again.

* * *

_Epilogue_

His voice is surprisingly steady.

Not surprising to her, of course. Teresa Lisbon believes she knows him well enough to know the distance in his tone is a mask, nothing else. The terseness in his shoulders tells her what she knows and yet does not want to know. Oh, how she hates him, this man that blows through her steel walls as if they were paper, who mocks her when she is dead serious and who plays her like a silly little puppet. She always thought a word like hate warranted an emotion so strong mankind shouldn't be using it. Clearly, she could not have been more wrong.

"She had it coming," Jane tells her tonelessly and walks past her without even looking her in the eye.

Teresa stares at Lorelai Martin's dead body and wonders whether one day she will be abandoned like this.


End file.
